The study of chemical reactions that are activated by oscillating electromagnetic fields – such as high-frequency light affecting the polarisability of a reaction system – has been given systematic attention for over five decades. On the other hand, and despite electrolytes and electrostatic forces being a ubiquitous component of any natural or man-made interface, there is little experimentally known about the impact of fields in near-surface ionic aggregates over non-redox chemical bonding. The theoretical framework for understanding these effects in terms of stabilization of transition states by promoting minor charge-separated resonance contributors is now a mature area of theoretical chemistry but measuring these effects has been an elusive task. Accessing quantitative insights has been seriously limited by the problem of orienting reagents in an electric field while accessing statistically significant data on chemical events. Here we show that the electrostatic component of a Debye layer prompt the redistribution of a non-redox equilibrium, demonstrating experimentally that specific ionic structures in reactant cluster and transition states can be stabilized (charge generation over charge migration) by an external electric field to the point where the effect on chemical bonding manifests without the need of a rigid constraint on reactants-to-field alignment. Deliberate changes to the electrostatic screening length in an electrolyte lead to a measurable redistribution of the equilibrium between a ring-closed spiropyran molecule and its ring-open merocyanine isomer, without the need of physically constraining the orientation of the reaction axis with respect to the field direction.